Framing climate change in terms of public health and/or national security may make climate change more personally relevant and emotionally engaging to segments of the public who are currently disengaged or even dismissive of the issue.

Don’t expect the results of this study to be made very public. But do expect them to be made very well known to the mainstream media, and watch them zealously apply the results with abandon soon in future communication with audiences.

As for the public, expect to be massively bombarded by all sorts of scare stories about the dangers of climate change to public health soon enough. I can see it now: climate change induced influenza, mental illness, epidemics, widespread allergies, rheumatism, malaria, cancer, depression…you name it!

The authors used a nationally representative online survey of U.S. residents (N = 1,127) conducted in December, 2010, and randomly assigned six previously identified audience segments on climate change to one of three experimental conditions.

The results: “across audience segments, the public health focus was the most likely to elicit emotional reactions consistent with support for climate change mitigation and adaptation.”

The introduction of the paper frames what the challenge is all about:

Effectively engaging the American public on climate change—including its causes, impacts, and solutions—remains both a major research question and a communication challenge.”

Clearly even though the public is growing more and more skeptical, the warmist bunch is a long way from giving up.

While many of us may scoff at the notion that a 1°C rise in temperature threatening public health, expect this dastardly scheme to scare will be aimed particularly at schoolchildren and students – the most emotionally vulnerable among us. Again, it’s the warmists resorting to the dirty tactics of scare-mongering and mass psychological manipulation.

The paper adds:

People’s emotional reactions to messages about climate change are an important consideration, yet to date they have often been overlooked both in research and in communication efforts. […] Emotions serve as affective prompts for engagement with an issue and lead to forming predispositions for action when a relevant situation arises.”

But the authors warn that there’s a risk of producing an unintended angry backlash, and that caution is needed:

However, eliciting anger against the claims or proposed recommendations emphasized in a communication strategy also has the danger of inciting action counter to the communicator’s intent. […] the very claim of climate change’s reality might elicit anger among people dismissive of the issue. Thus, a given message could generate an angry backlash by some recipients, leading to an unintended social response, while provoking an equally angry—yet intended—social response by other recipients.”

Us skeptics must work to educate the public about the true intentions of this budding campaign. We need to feed that legitimate backlash.

The authors end by saying the “research demonstrates the potential of the public health frame to inspire hope in the context of the climate change discussion while demonstrating the possibility that certain frames may be poorly received within some interpretive communities. More research is needed to understand how frames both set the context for perception on the issue and interact with emotions in guiding public decisions and behavior.”

It’s a good idea to print this study out and to read it carefully. In my view it’s a playbook for one of the next rounds of the manipulative mind games they intend to play on the public.

The study was supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Investigator Award and by the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
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15 responses to “Prepare For Climate Change-Related Public Health Scares – New Paper Exposes The Warmists’ Next Mind Games”

Wonderful. They even report about how they will manipulate public opinion. That’s like getting live reporting from SPECTRE’s secret lair. You have to keep that secret, you idiots. Didn’t you learn anything at your c0mmunist college.

Why keep it secret? The illustration is from H. G. Wells, “The War of the Worlds” – and Wells wrote about his Plans For The World (world government, despotism by a clique of Enlightened Samurai, etc.) in “The Open Conspiracy”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Conspiracy

I don’t know much about Well’s background. I just used the photo because the radio show succeeded in spreading lots of panic throughout the country. Yelling global warming to me is like yelling “the martians are landing!”

Welles was an ardent socialist, pacifist and globalist. His reasoning was that uniting the entire world under one socialist regime would remove the need for standing armies and thus free resources. He was actually a pretty gullible idiot, as he believed that after establishing a world dictatorship the total state would then wither away, as “predicted” by Engels. Fat chance, Welles!
“Eventually, after a century of reshaping humanity, the dictatorship is overthrown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the world state “withers away” (as was predicted by Friedrich Engels in his 1877 work Anti-Duhring). ”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come

All these climate related diseases can be cured by magnetizers and exorcists. Because health insurance companies usually do not pay for these treatments, the giant amounts of money devoted to climate research and control can be put in a fund to pay these practitioners. Problem solved.

Energy Security and Price hikes and dodgy suppliers are all used as canards to frighten the population. [into thinking -]

” Wow, having our own ‘plentiful’ renewable energy boondoggles will somehow and by some miracle reduce our reliance on ‘Johnny Foreigner’ for our future energy requirements” – it’s so funny – you couldn’t make it up.

They are, at the same time – pooh poohing fracking for gawd’s sakes, when we are sitting on billions of cubic metres of methane.

Le Cull: Bard Emden, makers of fine off shore wind energy contraptions, announces layoff of their rotor making department; 81 employees. Delays in the construction of off shore whirlygigs, caused by non-existent transmission lines, made it impossible to find work for them to do.http://www.emderzeitung.de/?id=20&nid=243299